Is Facebook Questions the new Fountain of Truth?
Facebook Questions is a new Q&A feature, similar to Yahoo! Answers, that is currently being released to a small portion of users on Facebook. This new application aims to exploit Facebook’s huge user base to provide crowdsourced answers to users asking for opinions, advice and recommendations on any subject.
Answers from friends are those that matter most to us, but questions are treated as public updates: They will appear in news feeds if started by friends, friends of friends or people referring to a topic connected to the user (liking pages and groups will now matter more than ever). A voting system will reward the best answers, making possible for users to become recognized as “experts” on a topic by the Facebook community.
Social search and informational queries
Questions and answers will quickly create a large knowledge base that in Facebook’s plans could rival Google Search (especially in its social search efforts) and Wikipedia as a destination for informational queries. Users can navigate through topics and find top rated answers for questions that have already been solved, subscribe to updates on current questions and rate answers.
Popular answers won’t be necessarily the correct ones, but the usage of real identities on Facebook (nicknames are used instead on similar Q+A websites) could encourage thoughtful and elaborate replies to questions.
Facebook Questions for e-commerce and advertisers
Trending topics could become useful for advertisers, but brands will be interested in using the Facebook Questions API (Application Programming Interface) also to integrate ecommerce features and for reputation monitoring purposes. Generic keywords could be monitored and brands able to offer helpful answers and recommendations will benefit from qualified leads coming from Questions.
Facebook Questions for customer support
Official Pages will be just the headquarters of customer service teams on Facebook. The extraordinary example of Microsoft’s Xbox support team on Twitter shows that the practice of tackling issues as they emerge in real-time, reported by the most active customers on social media, delivers very efficient solutions that provide personal connection with users and achieves very high levels of customer satisfaction. Questions could offer the same environment for brands that would have a great PR and customer service tool at their disposal.
If you don’t have the Questions feature enabled yet, you can read an in-depth preview of the interface on Inside Facebook.
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